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Duke Neurology Research Round-up, December 2016

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Duke Neurology faculty contributed to more than a dozen academic journals published in the final month of 2016. Their topics, which include three co-authored by Ying Xian, MD, PhD, ranged from a randomized controlled trial establishing the safety of a new treatment for intracranial hemorrhage, to evaluating associations between patients’ insurance status and their stroke outcomes. Here’s a brief summary of these studies:

Lead authors Jeffrey Guptill, MD, MHS, and Daniel Laskowitz, MD, MHS, as well as Shruti Raja, MD, and colleagues, published a phase 1 randomized, double-blinded, controlled trial to establish the safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of CN-105, a possible new treatment for spontaneous intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) which found no significant safety issues. These results clear CN-105 for the first phase-2 clinical trials for therapies for ICH. Read the full Clinical Pharmacology article here.

Christa Swisher, MD, and Saurabh Sinha, MD, PhD, wrote an article examining the current practices surrounding quantitative EEG (QEEG) for continuous monitoring of patients in critical care. Their survey of 75 neurophysiologists using QEEG in their practice found a need for greater standardization for QEEG methods and practices. Read the full study here.

Saurabh Sinha, MD, PhD, (and Duke Neurosurgery’s Michael Haglund, MD, PhD) co-authored an article examining how vagus nerve stimulation for epilepsy patients contributed to quality of life for more than 5,000 patients. Read that story here.

The research of Carol Colton, PhD, was a central point of a recent Alz Forum article discussing how a water channel called aquaporin 4 vanishes from its normal site in Alzheimer’s disease. Read that article here.

Wolfgang Liedtke, MD, PhD, was part of a research team that discovered a new pathway in the liver that opens the door to treat non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, a condition that affects up to 25 percent of the population and may lead to cirrhosis, liver failure, and other diseases. Read the Free Radical Biology and Medicine story here.

Katherine Peters, MD, PhD, and colleagues from the Departments of Pathology, Neurosurgery, and the School of Medicine authored a case study describing a patient with pilomyxoid astrocytoma, a rare and aggressive type of spinal cord tumor, as well as the use of single-agent carboplatin for this condition. Read their study here.

Ying Xian, MD, PhD, was the lead author of an article describing the design and rationale of the ARAMIS registry, a multicenter cohort study of acute stroke patients which will provide a picture of current treatment patterns and outcomes of acute ischemic stroke patients on Non–vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants (NOACs) and anticoagulation-related intracerebral hemorrhage on either NOACs or warfarin. Here’s the full study.

Xian also contributed to a study from the Journal of the American Heart Association that examined whether patients’ insurance status affected their stroke outcomes. The article found that uninsured stroke patients were less likely to receive appropriate care and more likely to die early. Read the full story here.

Finally, Xian contributed to a study which found that kidney function was an important predictor of poststroke short term outcomes. The cohort study in the most recent issue of Stroke found that high eGFR rates, a marker of kidney disease, were associated with higher rates of in-hospital mortality, lower odds of being discharged home, and other factors in 232,236 patients. Read that study here.

Richard O’Brien, MD, PhD, contributed to a Neurology study that found that patients with elevated cortisol levels (and increased cortisol variability) in urine were at an increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease. Read that story here.